Hobsons Partners With PAIRIN to Offer College Students Career Exploration Tools and Personalized Pathways Through Starfish Student Success Platform

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Hobsons, the education technology leader, and PAIRIN, the friendly science company, announced today a partnership to provide college students with access to PAIRIN’s soft skills survey and career exploration tools directly within Hobsons’ Starfish platform. Nearly 400 higher-ed institutions using Starfish will be able to support students as they discover their strengths and career interests, connect to current career opportunities, and build a personalized path to reach their goals.

PAIRIN Pathways is the first non-linear career exploration tool and factors in a person’s transferrable hard skills (experience), as well as soft skills (behaviors and mindsets) to help students discover their optimal career paths. Paired with the Starfish Enterprise Success Platform, which offers advanced capabilities for in-depth academic advising, case management, and personalized degree-planning tools for higher-ed institutions, students will now be able to:

Match directly to jobs within their preferred field and geographic location

Prioritize paths based on local labor market demand and future labor market outlook

Examine the difficulty level of reaching their chosen field and view their personalized readiness score (how prepared a student is for a specific job right now)

Receive direction on recommended certificate programs and interim jobs, even as they are continuing their studies

“We are proud to better equip colleges and universities with the ability to guide their students in determining a clear career path based on skill assessment and work experience,” said Howard Bell, Hobsons Senior Vice President and General Manager of Starfish. “Those on both traditional and nontraditional paths can develop actionable steps to reach their goals, while balancing various responsibilities, including raising a family or working part-time as they complete their studies.”

PAIRIN integrates millions of data points from numerous public and private data sources in a fun and engaging experience. Their highly predictive algorithms provide personalized career path recommendations, without requiring the student to deal with the complexities of piecing together each data system. Starfish will leverage these predictive algorithms to create specific, unique, and interactive guided pathways to students aligning course, major, and institutional supports to the student’s chosen career path.

"Identifying optimal career paths is critical to making the most of each student’s education and professional development, but the process must be highly personalized based on that individual’s experience, desires, interests and strengths, or they just won’t take it seriously," said Michael Simpson, CEO and co-founder of PAIRIN. "Partnering with Hobsons enables us to accelerate our mission of closing the skills gap and providing opportunities for students from all backgrounds to realize their full potential," Michael added.

PAIRIN will be fully integrated into Starfish and ready for student usage by the Fall 2018 semester. To learn more about Starfish, visit http://www.starfishsolutions.com.

About Hobsons
A global leader in education technology, Hobsons helps students to identify their strengths, explore careers, create academic plans, match to best-fit educational opportunities, and reach their education and life goals. More than 12,000 K-12 and higher education institutions partner with Hobsons and leverage our solutions -- Naviance, Intersect, and Starfish -- to improve college and career readiness, holistic college admissions, and higher education student support for millions of students around the world.

About Hobsons’ Starfish
The Starfish Enterprise Success Platform helps hundreds of colleges and universities efficiently scale their student success programs so that more students can achieve their academic and life goals. Hobsons’ Starfish analytics solution helps higher education institutions to identify at-risk students in real-time, pinpoint areas of concern, and connect students with valuable services. With Starfish, institutions can leverage reliable, actionable data to assess which services and interventions are working to keep students on track. Starfish was recently awarded the 2017 Guided Pathways to Success (GPS) Seal of Approval from Complete College America. To learn more, visit http://www.starfishsolutions.com.

About PAIRIN
PAIRIN is a social enterprise software company whose mission is to make education relevant and hiring equitable. The PAIRIN Readiness Management SystemTM is the world’s first industry independent cloud-based solution for integrating soft skills development and predictable matching into any program or company. Recognized as the 2017 Denver Chamber of Commerce Start-Up of the Year, the 2017 Colorado Technology Association APEX Emerging Tech Company of the Year award, and 2017 Colorado Companies to Watch winner, PAIRIN continues to lead the skills-based talent pipeline evolution for education and industry. Find out more at http://www.PAIRIN.com.